Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I started reading this book to get ready for football season. As it was, reading the book took longer to read than I’d anticipated, and it ended up extending into the football season.

As a reminder, in this book, the author joins the Detroit Lions training camp as an old rookie quarterback. Supposedly, he’s undercover, but it comes out eventually. As such, he lives in the dorm with the players, does the drills, even participates in a scrimmage and dresses for a preseason game.

I enjoyed the book well enough, as it reminded me how complex the game of football is and how complex the individual motions of football are. Plimpton has a hard time learning how to take a snap from the center. This is something second nature to the quarterbacks who make it to the pro leagues, as they’ve done it at the very least in high school and college until the time they hit training camp. I’ve decided I want to be an athlete now that I’m too old for it, and I’m finding myself having to slow down and study very basic body movement to figure out how to stride properly while running and whatnot. So it had that going for it.

However, one knock about the book is the artificial conceit of it. In the second chapter, he’s skating with Robert F. Kennedy because he’s a friend of the family. Plimpton came from some station in New York, so he’s looking at everything with the eyes of someone from the upper West Side. It probably wasn’t so bad in 1960 something, but it’s a bit jarring in the 21st century, especially as some of the name-dropping comes off as just that. So I can’t help compare it to the Jerry Kramer books and unfavorably, as Kramer is a farm kid who’s in the NFL.

Also, I can’t help but note that the co-writer of Run to Daylight says Paper Lion is the best book about football he’s ever read. Well. He must be a Lions fan, or he must not be counting the book he wrote, ainna?

At any rate, it’s worth a read. I also have Plimpton’s Open Net about a similar stunt with the Boston Bruins. Time will tell how fast I get to it. Probably not in time for hockey season.

I got this book recently for quick football season reading. I remembered reading Book of Top Ten Lists (apparently 13 years ago). However, I did not recall specifically reading this book before (which I did, about eight years ago, when before my sainted mother fell ill and before I moved to Nogglestead–was there such a time in my life?).

At any rate, I said of the first book:

The same politicians from almost fifteen years ago are the same punchlines in some cases. Al Sharpton, for instance, is a common motif in Letterman’s collection. In O’Rourke’s more serious obra, we see the same names we curse today. Diane Feinstein. John Kerry (who would almost seem to have served in Vietnam longer than in Congress based on the way he talks about it–as though the former determined his behavior and honor more than the latter–it’s almost like M*A*S*H in a way, wot?). Lt. Governor Gray Davis. O’Rourke exempts Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was 14 years ago.

It’s funny: now, it’s twenty-five years past the publication of the book, and it is lousy with Donald Trump jokes. That makes it the second book I’ve read this summer from days gone by that make light of Mr. Trump (The Know-It-All being the other). It continues to illustrate how long public figures remain in the limelight sometimes, I guess.

At any rate, to reiterate, the book works best if you were alive in the late 1980s so you can understand some of the recurrent punchlines ripped from the days’ headlines (G.E. light bulbs! Haw, haw!)

But it did give me some brief amusement again, and it did kill the time between plays in a couple of football games. So worth my time, but your mileage may vary.

This book is a novelization of the Weapon X storyline from the Marvel Comics that tells the origin of Wolverine’s metal skeleton. I was most familiar with it because a spin of it was part of the material covered in the first Wolverine movie. But I’ve never been a real fan of the mutant titles, to be honest. Which is why we’re a couple or three behind in the film series as well.

At any rate: The book follows two tracks. One is Logan getting captured, which is told from his point of view until he’s rendered a test subject, at which point it becomes a story of the scientists working with him. It shifts to the point of view of some of the employees at the facility, including some almost sympathetic looks at the guards and scientists. Then it comes to the ending where, if you don’t know, gentle reader, let me tell you: Wolverine awakens and kills everyone, and the desperate fight is told in great detail, and the scientists–even the ones with the backstories that make them somewhat sympathetic–die! But, wait, there’s a twist: it’s an induced mental part of his conditioning and didn’t happen! But wait, there’s another twist: A scientist pipes up that this mental induction technique was no longer used because it was sometimes predictive of the future! Then Wolverine wakes up, and everyone is killed quickly.

Oh, yeah, the second part of the story is Logan as a special ops man going into North Korea to stop something or other, and Logan dreams the memory of it as he’s being experimented on, so that’s how it crosses over into the main plotline. One of the helicopter pilots at the end turns out to be one of the security team at the facility, and he recognizes Logan ultimately right before Logan kills him.

So I thought the ending of the story was mangled. The whole double-twist thing was stupid. And, unfortunately, the excellent work humanizing the scientists in the novelization made the ending unsatisfactory because I didn’t want them dead. Most of the book is from their point of view, as I said, so the culmination of a revenge story at the end doesn’t seem congruous. But that’s a problem of the story, not the novelization.

At any rate, Marvel did a couple books around this time of that ilk, but I’m leery of them. I’ve got some other comic book novelizations around here, and I’ll probably get to them sooner rather than later, but I’m disappointed in this story.

This book collects some humor from several World War II era sources, such as Stars and Stripes, a book called Yank, and a couple of other works. It’s grouped by topic, which allows Osgood, the editor, to shuffle material from the same sources. It includes jokes, poems, humorous anecdotes, and whatnot.

As such, it is more easily approachable, prolly, to people of a certain age who grew up with Beetle Bailey and Sad Sack cartoons or who actually served. It’s not a bad read, but it’s from a time before cell phones, Twitter, and the Internet, which probably means that kids today won’t get much of the humor.

So not a bad read, but probably not something that’s going to sell a bunch more these days.

The KC Kid saw me reading this book out in public and asked if he was going to read the review for it sometime. Well, yes, but it won’t be much of a review.

I rediscovered this book as I turned around the books on the shelves in the hallway, and it’s the right time to read a book about football, am I right? After all, once September starts, all of my reading is going to be coloring books and chapbooks.

This book comes ten years after One Knee Equals Two Feet. In it, Madden talks about his all-Madden team and the beginning of some football “traditions”, such as the Madden football video game, his bus (he didn’t like to fly), and the Thanksgiving turkey awards. He also talks about players he’d include on his All-Madden team (through 1996), including Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith. Because this book only precedes my football fandom by about five years, I recognize the names of more of the players than I would in a book about the 1970s or 1980s (unless, of course, it’s a book about the Packers).

Madden also talks about coaching, officiating, and even other sports. It’s a quick read built on topical chapters, and it’s gotten me revved up for the football season more than the online reporting of the training camps and preseason have been. Contemporary journalism focuses a lot on personalities and injuries, but football books remind me how complex the game is and how difficult the playing of the game is. I need a reminder like that because I tend to watch something and think I could do it as well as the people on the screen. Which is not the case (as a recent visit to a ninja warrior sports gym reminded me physically).

So I enjoyed the book. Undoubtedly, he’s got other books available, and I’ll watch for them. It’s hard to believe he’s been retired for seven years (!) already, which is apparently long enough for me to mentally envision him and then think, “No, that’s John Candy.”

Oh, and I would be amiss if I didn’t point out that he alludes to having read Travels with Charley, and that he enjoys criss-crossing the country on his bus because he gets to see the country that way. How fun.

I bought this book nine years ago because the author wrote (or continues to write) the fiction column for Writer’s Digest, a magazine I took off and on for twenty years until I realized that scanning magazines about writing was not making me write more. Later that year, I bought Opening Nights, a novel by Janet Burroway, who wrote the textbook I used in a collegiate writing class simply because I wanted to see how she, and Kress, did with their fiction since they were also instructing about it. So I’ll probably read the Burroway presently if I can find it.

At any rate, Beggars in Spain is a science fiction book set in the near to medium term future of 1993. The driving point of it is that, soon, genetic modifications before birth will become normal, and one of the strangest is preventing the need for sleep. This creates a bunch of kids called Sleepless who eventually become smarter than their peers because they don’t waste time sleeping. Eventually, it comes to light that they do not age much, either. This creates a stratified society of super-productive and hyperrational citizens who carry a heavier tax burden than others, and the stratified society leads to some enmity between members of each class. The Sleepless try to create a Sleepless-only refuge planetside and then an orbital satellite where they can work, learn, and earn free of interference from the less productive sleepers.

The book is broken up into sections, each of which takes place in a certain year, and the years are separated by decades. The sleeper children grow up, but the Sleepless do not age. The main character, if you will, is a Sleepless who had a twin sister that is a Sleeper; it starts on their relationship as children and then the Sleepless sister becomes an attorney, which gives the book an in to dwell on the legal and ethical ramifications of what’s going on. Which she does.

So you’ve got a science fiction novel with Heinlein and Rand overtones. It definitely explores some themes, and it does so kinda wordily. The action in the book is overshadowed by the thematic musings, unfortunately. One almost expects the leader of the Sleepless to deliver a long speech to the Sleepers. But the thematic explorations are thoughtful: one gets a little sense of both sides in the Sleeper versus Sleepless philosophies, and one expects the ultimate goal is some Hegelian synthesis of the two.

In researching for this book report (by that, I mean when I looked at Wikipedia), I discovered this is the first part of a trilogy. There’s no real cliffhanger at the end leading to a second book (as a matter of fact, there’s no cliffhanger at the end of each section/year in the book that leads to the next), so I’m not sure where it would go from here. Sleepless in Space? Regardless, now that I’ve satisfied my curiosity in the work of the Writer’s Digest fiction columnist, I’m not eager to continue the saga.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought this book on my my recent trip to Florida. I read Big Trouble ten years ago and liked it, and, hey, it’s Dave Barry. So it should be funny and a Florida book (which I wanted to read while in Florida).

Well.

The setup is this: A young man is preparing to wed the beautiful, smart, and a bit controlling daughter of an uberwealthy man. He and his groom’s men arrive in Miami, the location of the wedding, and have a bachelor party. The bachelor passes out under the table for a bit, and his party moves on without him, and he loses his luggage with the ring in it. The rest of the book follows the zany adventures of the groom trying to retrieve the ring, harbor illegal aliens in his room, and deal with the problems of the groom’s men. Much marijuana is smoked.

Sadly, although it could have been a tour-de-force akin to Downtown by Ed McBain, but the setup of this book requires a bunch of drinking and marijuana to set up the situations. The construction of the series of events seems very artficial, as though it were crafted specifically to be made into a film akin to The Hangover and the like.

So I really didn’t enjoy it that much. It didn’t carry me along, although it did give me a new phrase to use: “Well, the ape is in the car now.” Which I use to express that something not very enjoyable is moving along a little better. Because once the ape gets in the SUV in the book, it moves along a little better. Although I still didn’t really laugh at anything after it.

I received this book as a Christmas present. You can find a pile of books from the same publisher in the local interest section of the book store, and I guess my mother-in-law picked it up when she bought me the new Woody P. Snow novel, which she also gave me for Christmas.

At any rate, this meticulously researched book covers crime in Springfield from its establishment as a town to the 1910s. Unfortunately, the information is presented as an era-per-chapter docket from the crime report section of the newspaper (one of the historical sources). We get a lot of citations for liquor violations, a lot of prostitution, and a little other murder and mayhem, but it’s presented very drily in a who did it and where fashion. A couple incidents, including the Wild Bill Hickoc shootout and the murder of Sarah Graham, get full chapters with a bit more flavor and narrative, but otherwise it’s just a litany in paragraphs.

It could certainly have been improved with more local flavor or more in-depth looks at some of the people involved, as the chapters that focus on the individual incidents are the best in the book.

I’ll probably steer clear of these titles and other thin roll-up local interest books from now on. Unless they’re fifty cents at a garage sale or a gift.